great news i am running STRAWBERRY JAM again this year for the SEVENTH (!!!) time in a row
it's my february-long game jam about making horny games
and since this is cohost i can now type like fifty paragraphs about that. it's about sexuality but it's not, like, graphic. i do say the word "vagina"
i increasingly feel that sexual media can be sorted into two broad, if fuzzy, categories, based on which side of the screen the audience is expected to want to be on.
this is a whole thing but please bear with me.
mainstream video porn is made by people who think porn is something you look at, who think the target audience is someone who wants to see a vagina. so they put a vagina behind the screen, and then the viewer can sit in front of the screen, observing from behind a pane of glass. if a penis is involved somehow, its owner is often cropped out as much as possible.
this is qualitatively different from a great deal of furry and queer and indie porn, or at least how it feels to me. that stuff is framed completely differently, as though the audience is expected to want to participate, to imagine themselves participating. both the creator and the viewer don't merely want to see a vagina — they want to be the girl, or the boy, or the animate pooltoy, or whoever. and so the framing is completely different, the camera pulled back, the ass shot expanded into an entire scenario, even if only a glimpse at one.
it's like night and day. this didn't crystallize for me until i joined a discord for an adult game in development (its dev was nice to me) and looked in its furry porn channel and felt like i had fallen into the mirror universe. it was absolutely nothing like the furry porn i see shared by furries. i'm looking in it right now to make sure i'm not projecting anything and i swear to god i just see a dozen pictures of pinups with vaginas showing in a row. the vast bulk of it has no dialogue, no framing, no event, nothing happening, just a character exposing themselves to the viewer for no reason other than that that's what the viewer is presumed to want to see.
and i mean that's fine. there's nothing wrong with that, or at least nothing i am qualified to go on at length about. and it's not like pinups are completely absent from more familiar spaces. but there is something curiously unnerving and alien about being in a space where this is the general consensus of what "porn" looks like.
and video games have this same division. in fact, the "games with sexuality" genre seems to be massively over-represented by one particular sort of experience: you are Some Guy (specifically a guy), you have absolutely no personality, and several hypersexual women with no self-awareness find you inexplicably irresistible. cue picture of sex. sometimes they skip the guy part entirely and just put a woman next to a bejeweled board; her clothes disappear as you get more points, but the sexuality and the interaction otherwise have nothing to do with each other.
i think this does video games, as a medium, a great disservice. i think being able to interact with a little simulated crafted world is fucking incredible, and i think it's a travesty that human sexuality is barely explored in that medium.
i can conjecture all sorts of reasons why. game development, for starters, is fucking hard. it takes a lot of effort across a lot of disciplines. video porn, on the other hand, has a baseline difficulty of "have sex" + "there is a camera". honestly that sounds much easier and maybe i should switch mediums.
but also, of course, sexuality is taboo [unless it is a popular actress being attractive in a major film in a way that no one comments on]. so games with sexuality have limited reach, limited resources, limited interests.
well, i can't do anything about that. but i suspect there's another side to the coin, which is that the general notion of an "adult game" is the kind of thing that already dominates.
and i can do something about that. i can start a game jam for making other kinds of games.
so i did.
and something magical happened: all of my dreams came true, on their own.
maybe the key is that i consistently say "horny game", which isn't even a real genre. no one says it but me! i see people say "porn games" or sometimes "nsfw games", and a large subculture speaks of "lewd games", but those all strongly imply the same thing: you will see genitals.
but what does "horny" mean here? that's not a word commonly used to describe media. it describes a feeling. it describes people. it's specific to whoever's saying it. which means it's specific to whoever's participating.
and that's what i want: not games that "are lewd", but games that are horny, to you. that's how you get that queer front-of-the-camera energy!
i've also tried to participate every time, and my very first entry was the prototype of fox flux — a game that's about transformation and platforming and has no sex in it.
i've never spelled all this out on the jam page itself. it's hard. the two categories feel like something i made up that a large chunk of people won't understand at all. i could start with "aren't you tired of adult games that just have a naked woman tacked on?", but that feels unnecessarily hostile and alienating. i don't even mind (mostly) if someone submits a game like that. with a little prodding they might just find they have some depths to plumb, so why come out of the gate swinging at them?
so i've really only nudged in the direction i want. (although i've gotten a bit more explicit over the years.) (also i do also put furries on the banner, which i assume acts as something of a filter lol)
for example, the jam has judging, and there are several categories to rate the games in — but the last three are stealth, novelty, and harmony. so there's acknowledgement built right in that, hey: games that are only horny to you, games that are unlike anything else, and games that knit sexuality with interaction are all worthwhile.
and it works. and consistently the games that top those categories are some of the most fascinating. stealth games like an idle clicker about making a critter grow indefinitely large or an arcade-ish game about nothing but circles; novel games that demand you prove you are a robot by resisting human distractions or are literal DVD-ROMs; harmonious games where you have to make the antidote before you shrink too small to reach anything or you participate in the drone uprising because you are one of them.
not one of these games is explicit! there is no sex and there are no genitals. i cherish them all. i'm delighted that people decided to make them just because i wrote "let's make some video games" on a pink website.
i hope the trend continues. i hope this little ad-hoc community of devs, wherever they came from, will keep channeling this energy.
i haven't touched my main twitter in two months now. i don't know if i want to tweet about this jam there. i don't know if i'm missing out on "Reach" or whatever if i don't, or if i'm inviting hostile energy if i do.
but while i think that over, maybe you could participate. y'know, if you want. there is so much of this space left to explore. i still dream of someone submitting a thoughtfully horny doom map.
also the banners are just a fucking blast to draw every year. i try to find the perfect balance between "not enough to be offputting if you're not into this" and "it is extremely clear what you should expect if you click this". really hope i nailed that again this time because i'm tagging this into the cohost global feed yolo
